Friday, January 15, 2016

BACK UP YOUR BACK-UPS!

BACK UP YOUR BACK-UPS!

Terri DelCampo

Recently,
a non-fiction internet market that I freelanced for, writing brief articles
(500 words max) shut down. I only spent half a day writing each article that I
submitted, so it was fun, and many times I could weave the topic into a horror
tale for Owl's Eye View Magazine as well making my research do double time.

Unfortunately,
the site eliminated the contributor's market, deciding to handle the department
with in-house staff rather than freelancers, and cut all of our material free,
which meant we could go ahead and submit it to other markets or post it in
blogs of our own (hence, my four non-fiction blogs).

While
I was dismayed about the paying market disappearing, I took it in stride, set
up my blogs, and went on with my life.

What
shocked me was the hysteria that the announcement stirred in the other
freelancers on the site.They were going
absolutely insane trying to download their articles, do screen shots and otherwise
copy their work to their computers.Some
of them had thousands of articles,
having written for the site since its inception.

I
could not believe the number of writers who wrote their articles directly onto
the site, without backing them up to their computers. I thought every writer
pretty much did what I do: write the article on my computer as a word doc, perfect
it, then copy and paste it onto the site. And after that, I copy the original
to a flash drive, as well as a one terabyte external hard drive.Now that might seem like overkill to you, but
I have hundreds of short stories and articles.I've had computers crash on me, and to date I've lost very little
material, because I've made saving it a part of my daily writing routine.

When
I commented about this on the community's Facebook page, the writers who were
frantically scrambling to retrieve their material within the two-week window
they had to do that before the site shut down, got very defensive and told me
that not all of them are professional writers, some have expertise in other
areas and writing is a secondary thing.

But
even at that, if you are good enough that your work is accepted by an editor,
and you have an expertise that allows you to publish your experience, your
tips, and opinions, why wouldn't you want to store those articles to share in
other venues or just with friends on social pages?There have been many times when I've messaged
someone an article I've written, right from my computer, rather than digging
for it in a site's archives.

Perhaps
I am overly possessive about my portfolio, but I can't imagine losing any of my
material because I didn't have the foresight to save it in more than one place,
especially when that one place is the internet.

Hopefully
my fellow writers will save their articles as they write them from now on and
never experience such downloading nightmares in the future.

On
September 13th, 2015 Terri married her Hottie Scottie, Blaze
McRob (Robert Nelson), who is an equally twisted horror writer who found her
online, crept into her world, swept her off her feet and revels in the fact that
they are two peas in a very strange pod.

No
doubt there will be many dark fiction tales for ooky aficionados to revel in
coming very soon.